Killer movie: Filmmaker turns disease into documentary

An insect bite transmits a parasite into the blood that eats the internal organs. Symptoms may not show up until 20 years later– and there's no cure. "It kills you very slowly," says Charlottesville filmmaker Ricardo Preve.

Preve didn't start out to make a documentary about Chagas, known in Latin America as the "AIDS of the poor." At first, the disease was merely a plot-line in a screenplay he was collaborating on called Chagas: An Argentine Love Story.

In north Argentina last March researching locations for the feature-length film, Preve discovered reality can be more compelling than fiction. "Doctors and social workers are fighting the disease with no funds," he says.

And then he met a childhood friend he hadn't seen in 30 years who has Chagas. Not only that, the friend's grandson probably has Chagas, laments Preve. "It was a powerful closing of a circle."

Preve currently is filming a Chagas documentary, A Hidden Affliction, in France, and he expects to finish in South America in May. "I'm hoping the documentary will be seen by a lot of people and raise money to make the fiction film," he says. Then he wants to piggyback the documentary onto a DVD of the feature film.

Like The Station Agent's Barry Sisson, another local screen luminary, Preve, 46, is a relative newcomer to filmmaking.

Until 2001, he was CEO for a large multinational corporation. He happened to be hanging with Argentine director Fernando Spiner, who was working on a sci-fi film called Goodbye Dear Moon.

"He asked what I was doing, and I said nothing, I just lost my job," recalls Preve. "Things happen in your life," muses Preve. "You meet a friend, and I discovered this was something I really like."

Since serving as associate producer on that Spiner film, Preve has begun several projects, including raising money for Joseph Nossiter's documentary Mondovino, about how commercialism has corrupted winemaking.